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> So the team started to ask — what if we looked at this problem in an entirely new way? What if, instead of trying to solve it with better hardware, we could d
by valine 10y ago
> So the team started to ask — what if we looked at this problem in an entirely new way? What if, instead of trying to solve it with better hardware, we could do it with smart software choices instead?
I feel like the lofty language takes something away from the article. It's not like using software to improve image quality is anything new. The image stacking technique they describe isn't particularly novel. I've done stuff like that for years. It even works on 3d renderings from a path tracer. Its cool their camera is fast and provides a nice ux when stacking images, but that's only possible because of the cameras hardware.
- lnanek2 10y agoAgreed. I think my last 5 smartphones have all had an HDR mode. Claiming it is something new is a little strange. Even HTC's relatively new technique of recording a couple seconds of continuous video as long as the camera app is open so it can provide an "instant" shutter button is years old at this point and that came out long after HDR in smartphone apps.
- GuiA 10y agoWhat's the resolution of the sensor? Does that mean it can record video at 16MP or something like that? I find that surprising given that all handset makers make a big deal of 4k recording.
- DougBTX 10y agoGuess: video recording produces large amounts of data while recording, so is disk write bound. "Instant capture" requires only a short, fixed duration, recording, so is only memory write bound. An alternative possibility, along the same lines, is that recording durable video is CPU bound due to compression, but a temp cache in RAM is small enough to have minimal compression requirements, so is not CPU bound.
- londons_explore 10y agoCamera HDR modes usually take 10 to 30 frames at full sensor resolution (RAW). That comes out to 16 Mpixels * 12 bits/pixel * 30 = 720Mbytes of RAM. Doable just about for a smartphone. If RAM is a concern, by using custom silicon which can process HDR very quickly, you can start to discard the first frames before the last is taken. The hardware necessary shares a lot of logic with video compression (calculating motion vectors etc.)
- muro 10y agoIt's not the same as "normal" HDR: https://research.googleblog.com/2014/10/hdr-low-light-and-high-dynamic-range.html https://research.googleblog.com/2014/10/hdr-low-light-and-hi...
- Someone1234 10y agoI read the article. That is absolutely normal HDR. I was doing most of those techniques five years ago via DSLR burst and merging the images in post. What from that article don't you consider "normal HDR?" Because as I said, everything listed there is completely par for the course. "HDR+" is just obvious branding for standard HDR that happens to use more bracketed shots than other HDR systems (e.g. 5x instead of 3x).
- puzzle 10y agoNormal HDR is usually implemented as bracketing. As the section "Capturing high dynamic range scenes" explains, HDR+ does not use bracketing.
- lightbyte 10y agoThat article describes exactly how "normal HDR" is achieved with a DSLR.
- fulafel 10y agoI don't think "normal HDR" traditionally includes this: "HDR+ addresses [low-light blur/noise] by taking a burst of shots with short exposure times, aligning them algorithmically, and replacing each pixel with the average color at that position across all the shots. Averaging multiple shots reduces noise, and using short exposures reduces blur."
- ynniv 10y agoReducing shutter speed to reduce blur isn't new (https://www.dpreview.com/articles/1528656007/notimagestabilization https://www.dpreview.com/articles/1528656007/notimagestabili...), accumulating sensor exposure is how DSLRs work, and aligning frames is how image stabilization works. It might not be what we call "HDR", but there's nothing new here. The combination in a phone camera sounds nice.
- microcolonel 10y agoEspecially considering that Nokia gave a huge push to computational photography back with the N900. In fact, the name "GCam" is probably related to "FCam". I guess this is just how marketing copy ends up being handled at companies this size. Apple constantly insinuates that they wrote WebKit from scratch, and that it constituted some sort of "innovation".
- mtgx 10y agoI'm not even sure what that means. So Google would rather use the same sensor hardware for 4 years in its Pixels, and just focus on the software? I'd rather they renew the hardware with something better as well, as the technology improves.